NEW ORLEANS - Computer Associates' decision to reinvent itself as an "e-business" could have broad effects for its enterprise users.
For instance, it could make managing IP networks easier, as well as ease the integration of legacy business logic with the Web, suggest CA executives. This week at the CA World trade show, CA executives have declared in no uncertain terms the company is revamping itself from top to bottom with the goal of becoming a major e-business market player. "E-business is CA's business," as CA President and Chief Operating Officer Sanjay Kumar said it in his keynote speech Monday morning. It is the most ambitious makeover for the company in the past dozen years.
Key to CA's strategy is its Jasmine ii application server, database, Web portal and integration software. Also important are its Neugents business intelligence products, which can be integrated with Jasmine ii. However, because Jasmine ii does so many things, descriptions of it at times seem as muddy as the nearby Mississippi River. Among its various abilities, Jasmine ii can act as a middleware platform that will let users tie together heterogeneous platforms in new ways. For instance, CA says it will help enterprise users integrate their existing networks with e-business storefronts.
With Jasmine ii, Kumar says, IT staff can in a short time take legacy mainframe business applications - such as IBM's CICS, a customizable, multipurpose transaction monitor - and tie them into current e-business applications using XML and Enterprise Java Beans.
CA's next-generation Unicenter TND enterprise management product, now in beta, is built on the Jasmine ii platform, Kumar says. This will enable IT staff to integrate their management tools with a wide variety of other software technologies to let TND execute complex functions that were not possible before. For instance, says Kumar, IT staff on the fly will be able to create geographical maps of their WANs; by clicking on, say, a server farm icon, users can zoom into individual parts of the server farm and get details.
CA also has high hopes for its Neugents business intelligence software, which can analyze large amounts of data and come up with predictions and analyses of future behavior. And not only will Neugents be able to predict online buying behavior of customers, it can be used to help keep the network up and running by predicting potential failures.
In the future, Neugents could be used in a variety of ways, says Allan Andersen, a CA product manager. For instance, if a server crashed in the middle of a job, Neugents could determine how that failure will affect other servers or operations in the network, and let IT staff act accordingly.
Although the company is recasting itself as a major Web technology leader, Kumar emphasized that its traditional mainframe business is not going to fade away. In fact, the Sterling Software acquisition earlier this year has added to CA's product lineup a number of new tools for mainframe storage management, among other things.
Jasmine ii is shipping now and starts at $2,000; it runs on Windows NT and Windows 2000. Support for AIX, Solaris and Linux will be coming later this quarter.
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